Down To Earth

Editorial. Sunita Narain.
II.XVIII.XVI

Unreal in pampered
India

by Sunita
Narain

Many years
ago, when Delhi’s air pollution was as high
as it is today, my colleague Anil Agarwal and I
had gone to meet a high-ranking, responsible
government official. This was in the mid-1990s,
when air was black because we did not even have
the most rudimentary fuel quality and emission
controls. The official was genuinely stumped by
our demand that government should take steps to
control runaway pollution. He kept asking,
“But is Delhi really polluted?” I was
equally flummoxed; air was foul and black. How
could he miss it?

Then I realised that his
world was not mine to see. He travelled from his
home, located in luxuriantly green Lutyens’
Delhi—also known as the New Delhi Municipal
Council (NDMC), where government resides—to
his office, also in the same verdant surroundings.
Nowhere did he see any dirt; nowhere did he smell
the air. And as it was not seen, it could not
exist, so nothing needed to be
done.

This incident came to my
mind when I read that the Government of India had
decided to select New Delhi—Lutyens’
Delhi—for the smart city makeover. Under
this scheme, 20 cities have been selected based on
“rigorous” criteria to improve urban
living. The Government of India will now provide
funds and expertise to make the city
“smart”—defined as innovative
approaches to improvement in urban services. This
means that the government will spend on facilities
to make its own living area even better and more
removed from the squalor, poverty and pollution of
the rest of India.

The announcement
declaring New Delhi Municipal Council a winner of
the smart city challenge came when the rest of
Delhi was drowning in urban waste. Municipal
workers had declared a strike alleging
non-payment of their dues. The contrast between
where the government lives and where the rest of
the citizens live could not have been more evident
and striking. The fact that the government was now
investing even more to make its own world better
is a damning indictment of its non-inclusive
approach to urban India.

Just think. This is
India’s gated community of elite access. Of
the total land area of Delhi, Lutyens’
city—named after the British urban planner
and constructed to reflect the grandeur of the
colonial state—is only three per cent. The
Government of India owns over 80 per cent of the
land, including the buildings in the Lutyens zone.
No democracy is at work here. The NDMC is a
council and not a corporation, so it is headed not
by an elected representative but by a
bureaucrat.

It is also a parasite of
a city; it has the highest water footprint as
compared to any other part of India. Its daily per
capita water supply is 462 litres, while in other
parts of the same city people get below 30 litres.
Even as per government’s own norms, which
specify highest water supply as 150 litres per
capita per day, this is excessive, indeed
gluttonous and wasteful. This water inequity is
shameful and should have, in fact, disqualified
Lutyens’ Delhi from any smart city challenge
in my view.

It is also highly
land-extravagant. While the city of Delhi has been
imploding with a decadal growth rate of almost 50
per cent, the NDMC area is so privileged that it
has a negative decadal growth rate of 2 per cent,
according to its own sub-zonal plan. In other
words, people are not welcome in this gated city.
In this city of India, over 30 per cent of the
land is under recreational purposes. This is so
out of sync with the rest of the city and indeed
the rest of India that is fighting for its inches
of green spaces.

But even with all this
land, the gated city of NDMC does not manage its
own waste. This is sent to the rest of
Delhi’s landfills. Its land is too precious
for its waste. It does a lot of “cute”
stuff like segregation of waste and even involves
rag pickers in collecting waste from households.
But the bulk of its waste goes to Okhla, where the
compost plant is dysfunctional, and the rest to
Delhi’s overflowing Ghazipur landfill. This
is when it has no shortage of funds as government
spends on itself without any
questions.

New Delhi is not a smart
city for all these reasons. It is certainly not a
city that can be replicated in the rest of India.
It is resource-inefficient, highly iniquitous and
highly environmentally unprincipled. This is not
what smart cities should stand
for.

Former New York mayor
and billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s
foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, is
government’s knowledge partner for the Smart
Cities Initiative. This initiative will define
what smart cities will mean for India and what we
must aspire to. It is important for this reason
alone that they must choose wisely. The symbols of
India’s urban renewal cannot be cities for
the elite and by the elite. This is not
smart—not by a long shot.